Yes, I am cut off from a friend right now, and the reason is political. Iran has blocked access to Facebook in light of the upcoming presidential elections. Mir Hossein Mousavi is challenging current President Ahmadinejad in the upcoming June 12th presidential election. Mousavi was using Facebook and had over 5,000 supporters (not a lot in a country of that size) on his main page (warning: I think that is written in Farsi) although there are a lot of smaller pages of supporters.
In this country we saw the power of the internet and social networking in the 2008 election. That is one place where everyone can pretty much agree that the Obama campaign ran circles around the McCain campaign. Obviously, someone in Iran is worried a similar phenomena could take root there.
And I went ahead and checked my friends list and Marjan is missing. I don't know why...we have some mutual friends and she is missing from their friends list as well, so she didn't just ditch me for some reason. Searching for her yielded no results either so her account seems to be gone. I would have been a little ticked at the government of Iran for this under normal circumstances, but now it is personal!
I am curious and will be watching for her to see if she show up again after the elections.
Maybe we should start blogging virulently against Ahmidinejad so we can get banned in Iran. It can only be good publicity.
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3 comments:
Hale, I truly hope that your friend's absence is merely because of political reasons and nothing more.
Now, I want everyone to think how very lucky we are to be able to voice our disgreement with our government from time to time and not ending up being blocked from each other. We have all the members of the military to thank for our freedoms.
B.
This is a great weekend to bring this to light.
When I was in elementary school, my neighbors family from checkoslovakia came to the U.S.
The two daughters attended school with me. The family did not get the Visa to stay like they wanted.
We corresponded when they returned to their country. I would get mail that their government would blacken out parts with magic marker. All of a sudden, no more letters no more responses.
I hope you reconnect with your friend. We are lucky to live in the USA. No doubt about it.
I always try to be virulent in a virtual way.
That's a shame about your friend, hale. I, too, hope that it's political BS and she is alright.
My parents corresponded with their families in the homeland when I was a kid. All the mail was censored. I remember them once purchasing some medicine needed by someone overseas, going through all the postal and customs red tape, and mailing it. It was simply returned.
Thank you all who have sacrificed so much for us in the USA.
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